Achievement

Columbia Professors Jeff Koberstein and Nicholas Turro, with IGERT Chemistry student Greg Carroll and IGERT Chemical Engineering student Nicholas Carbone, together with Chemistry students Ellane Park and Jeffrey Lancaster, have melded surface science and photochemistry into a multidisciplinary success story. They have shown that "shedding light on surfaces" is an effective means for fabricating a broad spectrum of designer surfaces that enable multiple applications. Perhaps the most impressive example of how the interdisciplinary approach can have broad impact is the use of light to fabricate monolayers of chemically bound carbohydrates, the first example of a general method for covalent binding of carbohydrates without chemical modification. These microarrays were used in a collaboration with NIH scientists to determine the nature of surface receptors on Bacillicus Antrhacis. A related approach has now been used to develop methods for crosslinking polymers in the glassy state.